Fake snow (kind of)

[domdib]

I've been playing with Matt's mackerel sky and I stumbled across a setting that looks a bit like snow, at least in the air. So I added in another altocumulus layer, as the apparent source. See what you think.

[Henry Blewer]

That's interesting. I always thought that snow would have to be done in post.

[Dune]

Aren't they just 'tiny' clouds? Perhaps a low layer of (blended) cloud with the right (minute) settings and low quality would produce flakes as well, never tried it. Might try it in a minute...

---Dune

[domdib]

They are indeed just 'tiny' clouds. And if you can improve on this, please do Dune.

[Falcon]

Here's my try.

This is a cloud layer at height 0, depth 2000 with the distribution pattern set to feature scale 0.1, lead-in 0.2, smallest 0.05 and a few tweaks in lighting.

It's a beginning. Near the camera it's not very convincing yet, but in the middle distance, cool.

[domdib]

Looks intriguing.

[eido]

Looks good and is an interesting use of the cloud functions.

It will of course look more convincing if you added some 'fogging' - all those little flakes tend to look like fog after a short distance. In both images the distant landscape is too visible.

[Zylot]

I think, with the proper use of clouds-as-fog (as mentioned above) and snow on the ground, this would look 100% real.

[domdib]

A combination of the two files plus the fog might be helpful. In any event, here's the clip file I used.

[Oshyan]

Fogging, and some noise stretch for motion blur?

- Oshyan

[Dune]

The issue intrigued me and I went to work on it. Promising results.

---Dune

[Falcon]

Very interesting. I'm doing a render now with fog and snow. It's taking a while, I'll post it as soon as it's done.

Some things on my mind while I wait for it to finish are these:

A distance shader could be used to fade snow into fog - after all, the "fog" really is just dense snow seen at a distance. That would give us clear snow "flakes" in the foreground and fog in the distance, nicely blended into each other.

Thinking about the stretching - with the same method and some considerable y-stretching one may be able to achieve rain. What do you all think?


Edit: Here it is. I actually did it again and disabled the fog - this is pretty cool without, and dense enough that you get reduced visibility in the distance.

[Dune]

I'm busy as well, here's another image. I used a distance shader, but got rid of it afterwards. Stretching the Y, as well as blending will get the 'showers'. It takes a lot of tweaking. Don't look at the landscape, by the way.

---Dune

[Henry Blewer]

The most realistic results so far have been from Dune and Falcon. I think Falcon's has the best one. I like Dune's also, but I think it would be better with the vertical turned slightly as if driven by wind.

About this thread, who would have thought this was possible? Could this lead to a procedural generator for weather? That would be a unique feature.

[Falcon]

Here's a high-detail render. Starts looking good, but I need to fix the snow layer a little and then the fake snow.

What I changed in this one is the density and fractals of the fake snow. My idea was that changes in the snow flake size are one of the reasons the picture lacks depth. So I set lead-in, feature size and smallest size to the same value. But it doesn't make much of a difference. Will have to think of something else.